Senior Lecturer, School of Public Health, The University of Queensland

Disclosure statement

Cindy Shannon is affiliated with AIATSIS as an external appointment.

Nina Lansbury Hall and Paul Jagals do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

As a developed nation, it might be assumed that Australia will easily meet these new goals at home – including goal number 6, to ensure “availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all”. But the unpalatable truth is that many Australians still lack access to clean water and effective sanitation.

Cleaning faces can break the link with long-term ear and eye health impacts such as trachoma and deafness.The Footprints Network

Similarly, glue ear, which is influenced by poor water and hygiene practices and can cause permanent hearing loss and developmental difficulties, is prominent in these communities. The Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that one in eight Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people reported ear and/or hearing problems in 2012-13. This is significantly more than non-Indigenous people.

Installing properly managed community swimming pools can provide a community-wide (and enjoyable) amenity that will also contribute to preventing glue ear, trachoma and other hygiene-related infections.

Community swimming pools have been found to be the best way to ensure clean skin and prevent the spread of neglected tropical diseases.OzOutback

How committed is Australia to delivering at home?

In signing up to the SDGs last September, the Australian government stated that this agenda:

…helps Australia in advocating for a strong focus on economic growth and development in the Indo-Pacific region … [and is] well aligned with Australia’s foreign, security and trade interests.

What is glaring about this statement is the lack of any mention of a national focus.

Australia should focus on delivering safe water at home as well as abroad – especially given Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s new role as a member of the United Nations’ High-Level Panel on Water.

Our discussion paper sets out how Australia can approach the task of delivering safe water, sanitation services and hygiene practices both at home and in the Asia-Pacific region.

One crucial recommendation is for government departments to avoid addressing the 17 SDGs (which have 169 different targets) as a simple “checklist”, because many of them overlap and intersect in complex ways.

For example, education quality (SDG 4) can affect gender equality (SDG 5), which in turn affects behaviour around water use and hygiene (SDG 6). Similarly, within SDG 6 itself are targets to protect water-based ecosystems, but this obviously influences the accompanying targets of water quality and universal human access to safe water.

The World Health Organisation has estimated that access to clean, safe water and sanitation could reduce the global disease burden by almost 10%. The UN SDGs provide aspirational goals to address this. In Australia, the disease burden is low but persistent. This means that the goal for proper water and sanitation cannot be said to have been satisfactorily met.

This week’s UN talks offer an ideal time to put Australia’s remote communities in the spotlight and draw much-needed attention to the preventable toll of water-related health issues they still experience.

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Michael Otieno, a pharmacist, dispenses anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs at a hospital in Nairobi, Kenya. Among the new sustainable development goals is promoting mental health and well being and achieving universal health care.
Reuters/Thomas Mukoya